The better the engineers on staff, the more durable repairs during an event will become, but at a cost. The same can be said for improved racing parts, which play a vital role once you start throwing your helmet into larger 12-stage events. However, better-quality parts don’t quite translate into having the fastest 22B on the icy hills of Varland, Sweden-rather, the parts you do have last longer and won’t take as long to repair. Lucas Garrett: Thank you, Ralph, for talking with me today.This means that when you hit a water hazard too fast or bounce off yet another fence, you’ll get a chance to hit a few more things before stuff really starts to fall apart. Life is strange, but NipperFest is like the rainbow at the end of a dark cloud. LG: Yes, that’s why I reached out to you today, to talk to you before the festival. Tell us a bit about how you got into music. RR: I was about seven or eight years old and I loved Kiss – I saw Kiss on TV. It scared the hell out of me, but I loved it. I think my uncle bought me the first four solo Kiss albums. Then, shortly after that… I was just intrigued by their faces on the covers. I was like, “Wow, I want to do this!” I think it was more that I wanted to be a monster than a musician. RR: I was going to a Catholic school at the time. My mother started going to these meetings down there, we come from a Catholic family. ![]() One night she came home from a meeting and the hot topic in the meeting was “Kiss: Knights in Satan’s Service.” My mother said “We’re going to take away your Kiss records.” My parents were never like that growing up. Early on, she took away the Kiss records and said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to go out and buy you six new records tomorrow.” She came home with the Village People, Andy Gibb… she came home with those K-tel records… They always let me do what I wanted to do as a teenager and young adult. ![]() RR: From there, I was like, “OK, she tried to buy me music she liked.” But still, she was a cool mom and supported me, she was just scared about that whole Satan thing with Kiss. That’s what drove me toward classic rock: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Beatles, Eagles, all of those bands. Then, of course, being a child of the eighties, I became a DJ. So, I really wasn’t a musician until I started playing in a band when I was 23 years old. RR: I played bass in a band called Politics of Contraband. Four different kinds of people that played really wacky, silly punk-rock and hardcore. People came for the comedy as well as for the music. That band was short lived because everybody was busy with their own bands and families. I was singing for them and I would write music. ![]() All the while, though, I wanted to play rock-and-roll. RR: You know what I mean? I was always a rocker before I was a metalhead or punk-rocker, or whatever you’d want to call it. I was always playing acoustic and singing in my room, but I’d never dared do it on stage because I didn’t feel I could do it. Screaming was where I found my comfort zone, I guess. RR: I was an angry guy at one time so I guess it worked for the best. LG: You did all that and now you have a new band that you’re playing with, called The Tradition. RR: The Tradition was where I wound up trying to slide out of metal and hardcore into rock and play and sing a bit more. I wasn’t playing anymore I was just singing for a metal band. I tried a couple other bands: Black John Wayne and Letgodaylight. They were leaning more toward rock, but still leaning metal. I feel confident enough to go out there and sing.
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